The Second World War was the last conflict in which the individual soldier's rifle still decided a great deal, and the first in which it began to stop mattering quite so much. Six years of total war compressed about thirty years of firearms development into one brutal design cycle. Weapons that entered service in 1939 looking entirely modern were obsolete by 1945, and one gun that appeared right at the end rendered almost everything else on this list a museum piece.
What follows is fifteen firearms that genuinely mattered - because of what they did, what they started, or the sheer hold they still have on how we picture the war. A few of them earned their reputation. A couple have reputations they don't quite deserve, and we'll say so.
Britain
The Lee-Enfield
Bolt-action rifle | .303 British | 10-round magazine
If one weapon defines the British soldier of both world wars, it is the Lee-Enfield. The SMLE Mk III arrived in 1907 and was still fighting in 1939; the simplified No.4 Mk I took over from 1941 and served long after the war ended.
Its advantage over every other bolt-action of the era came down to two design choices. The magazine held ten rounds - double the German Kar98k's five. And the bolt cocked on closing rather than opening, with the handle turned down close to the hand, which meant a trained rifleman could work it without breaking his firing grip.
The result was a rate of fire that genuinely alarmed people on the receiving end. British musketry training built around the "mad minute" - as many aimed rounds as possible into a target at 300 yards in sixty seconds - and pre-war regulars routinely managed fifteen. The record, set in 1914, stands at thirty-eight. German troops in 1914 reported meeting what they assumed were machine guns and were in fact ordinary infantry with bolt-action rifles.
It was never the most accurate rifle of the war. It was fast, tough, easy to maintain, and it never stopped working, which in the end mattered more.
Our replica: Lee-Enfield SMLE Rifle, British 1907
The Sten Gun
Submachine gun | 9mm Parabellum | 32-round side magazine
The Sten is the least elegant weapon on this list and one of the most important. Britain in 1940 had lost most of its equipment at Dunkirk and needed submachine guns immediately, in enormous numbers, from factories that had never made guns before.
What it got was a tube, a bolt, a spring and a wire stock, made from stamped steel and welded together. It cost roughly a couple of pounds to produce. Around four million were built.
Soldiers called it the Woolworth gun and the plumber's nightmare, and their contempt was not entirely unearned - the side-mounted magazine was awkward, and a knock in the wrong place could persuade an early Sten to fire on its own. It also famously jammed at the worst possible moment during the 1942 assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, which forced the team onto a grenade instead.
But it was chambered for 9mm specifically so it could feed on captured German ammunition, it could be built in a shed, and it was air-dropped in quantity to resistance movements across occupied Europe. Few weapons have ever delivered so much for so little.
Our replica: Sten MkII British SMG, 1940
The Browning Hi-Power
Semi-automatic pistol | 9mm Parabellum | 13-round magazine
John Browning's last design, finished after his death by Dieudonné Saive at FN in Belgium and adopted in 1935. Its headline feature was the magazine: thirteen rounds at a time when most service pistols held seven or eight. The staggered double-stack column that made this possible became the standard way to build a pistol magazine, and still is.
It has the strange distinction of having been carried by both sides. Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, took over the FN factory and kept building Hi-Powers for the Wehrmacht, while production continued simultaneously in Canada under licence for Allied forces.
It then stayed in British service for an extraordinarily long time - from the war until 2013, when the Glock 17 finally replaced it. Seventy-eight years is a remarkable run for any piece of equipment.
Our replica: Browning "High Power" HP35, British Army Service Pistol
The Webley Revolver
Revolver | .38/200
By 1939 the British Army had moved from the enormous .455 Webleys of the previous war down to a .38, on the reasonable grounds that the average conscript could actually be trained to hit something with it. The Webley Mk IV served alongside the Enfield No.2 throughout the war, in the hands of officers, tank crews, aircrew and anyone else for whom a rifle was impractical.
It is a revolver, so it is slow to reload and holds six rounds, and by the standards of the automatic pistols on this list it was already old-fashioned. It was also completely reliable, worked when filthy, and could be handed to someone with an afternoon's instruction. It has had a long second career on screen - Indiana Jones, Peaky Blinders and Torchwood have all put one on camera.
Our replica: Webley Mk IV
The United States
The M1 Garand
Semi-automatic rifle | .30-06 Springfield | 8-round en bloc clip
The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle issued as standard to an entire army, and it changed what infantry combat felt like. While the rest of the world was working a bolt between every shot, American riflemen were firing eight rounds as fast as they could aim. Patton called it "the greatest battle implement ever devised", and for once the hyperbole was close to fair.
The distinctive part is the en bloc clip. Eight rounds are loaded as a single unit, and when the last one is fired the empty clip is ejected upward with a clear metallic ping.
That ping has generated the most durable myth in small-arms folklore: the story that German and Japanese soldiers listened for it and rushed the position while the American reloaded. It is a wonderful story and there is almost no evidence for it. In the noise of an actual firefight - with multiple rifles, machine guns and artillery - picking out one small ping at a distance, identifying whose it was, and closing before he could reload in two or three seconds is not a realistic proposition. Some American troops apparently threw spare clips to bait the enemy, which suggests the idea was in circulation at the time. It doesn't establish it ever worked.
Our replica: M1 Garand, USA WWII
The M1 Carbine
Semi-automatic carbine | .30 Carbine | 15-round magazine
The M1 Carbine was designed for everyone who needed a weapon but could not sensibly carry a full-sized rifle - drivers, radio operators, mortar teams, artillery crews, paratroopers, officers. It is light, short, easy to shoot and holds fifteen rounds.
It became the most-produced American small arm of the war, with over six million made - more than the Garand. Its cartridge was distinctly underpowered, a complaint that followed it through Korea and into Vietnam, but for the job it was actually built to do it was very close to ideal.
Our replica: M1 Carbine, USA 1941
The Thompson Submachine Gun
Submachine gun | .45 ACP | 20/30-round stick or 50-round drum
The Tommy Gun reached the war with its reputation already fully formed. Designed just too late for the First World War, it spent the 1920s and 30s becoming the defining image of American gangland, and arrived in 1939 carrying all of that with it.
In service it was superb and impractical in roughly equal measure. The .45 round hit extremely hard at close range and the gun was beautifully made - which was the problem, because beautifully made meant slow and expensive. Early Thompsons cost around $200 apiece, an enormous sum for an infantry weapon. The drum magazine that looks so good on screen was heavy, noisy and prone to jamming, and troops in the field generally binned it for a stick magazine.
The wartime M1 and M1A1 versions stripped out the finned barrel, the compensator and the drum to get the price down to about $45. They worked just as well and look far less like the movies.
Our replicas: Tommy Gun M1 Submachine Gun and the Thompson M1928A1
The M1911A1
Semi-automatic pistol | .45 ACP | 7-round magazine
Another Browning design, adopted in 1911 after the US Army decided it wanted a heavier pistol round, updated in the 1920s to the M1911A1 with a shorter trigger and a reshaped grip, and then kept in frontline service until 1985. Seventy-four years as a standard-issue sidearm is a record almost nothing else can touch.
It holds only seven rounds, which by 1935 already looked stingy next to the Hi-Power's thirteen. Nobody much cared. The .45 ACP cartridge had a fearsome reputation, the pistol was accurate and controllable, and the basic design is still being manufactured and carried today, well over a century after it was adopted.
Our replicas: M1911A1 Colt "Government" in nickel and in black and wood
The M3 "Grease Gun"
Submachine gun | .45 ACP | 30-round magazine
America's answer to the same question Britain had answered with the Sten: how do you build a submachine gun that costs almost nothing? The M3 arrived in late 1942 as stamped steel, a retracting wire stock and very little else, at somewhere around $15-20 against the Thompson's $45.
Troops named it the Grease Gun because that is exactly what it looks like. Its slow rate of fire made it unusually easy to control, and while nobody ever loved it the way they loved a Thompson, it did the job and cost a fraction as much. It stayed in US service, mostly with vehicle crews, into the 1990s.
Our replica: USA WWII M3 "Grease Gun" SMG
Germany
The MP40
Submachine gun | 9mm Parabellum | 32-round magazine
The MP40 is probably the most recognisable German weapon of the war, and almost everything the average person knows about it is slightly wrong.
Start with the name. It is universally called the "Schmeisser", and Hugo Schmeisser did not design it. He designed the MP18 of the previous war and later worked on the StG 44, but the MP40 came from Heinrich Vollmer at Erma Werke. Allied intelligence attached the famous name to it early on and it never came off.
Then the numbers. Film and television give the impression that every German soldier carried one. Around a million were built across the whole war, against many millions of Kar98k bolt-action rifles - the MP40 went to squad leaders, paratroopers, vehicle crews and tank commanders, not to the ordinary rifleman.
What it genuinely was: the first mass-produced submachine gun designed from the start around stamped steel and plastic rather than machined wood and forgings, with a folding stock and a deliberately slow rate of fire of about 500 rounds per minute that made it unusually easy to hold on target. Every submachine gun that followed borrowed from it.
Our replica: Call of Duty MP40
The StG 44
Assault rifle | 7.92x33mm Kurz | 30-round magazine
This is the one that made everything else obsolete.
The problem it solved had been obvious for decades. Rifle cartridges were designed for accurate fire out to a thousand yards or more, but the overwhelming majority of actual infantry combat happened inside three hundred. So soldiers carried rifles that were heavier, harder to control and slower to shoot than they needed - or submachine guns that were pleasant to use and useless past a hundred yards.
The German answer was a cartridge in between: the 7.92mm Kurz, or "short", with enough range for real fighting and little enough recoil to fire automatically from the shoulder. Around it they built a select-fire rifle with a thirty-round magazine.
The development story is well known and probably a bit polished in the retelling: Hitler is said to have blocked a new rifle programme, so the project was continued under the designation MP43 - a machine pistol, nothing to see here - before being unveiled to him and renamed the Sturmgewehr, or "storm rifle", a name he is credited with coining himself.
It arrived far too late and in far too few numbers to change anything. It also defined every infantry rifle built since. The AK-47, the M16, the SA80 - all of them are working from the template the StG 44 established.
Our replica: Call of Duty StG 44 Sturmgewehr
The Luger P08
Semi-automatic pistol | 9mm Parabellum | 8-round magazine
The Luger is the most beautiful pistol on this list and, by 1939, one of the least practical. Its toggle-lock action - which breaks upward in the middle like a knuckle rather than sliding back - is mechanically gorgeous, extremely precise, and exactly the sort of thing that stops working when a soldier drops it in mud.
The 9mm Parabellum cartridge, now the most widely used pistol round on earth, was developed for this gun. That is a considerable legacy for a design that was already being phased out in favour of the cheaper, tougher Walther P38 before the war even started.
It survived anyway, because it was the single most sought-after souvenir of the entire war. Allied troops wanted a Luger the way earlier generations wanted a regimental colour, and a great many of the ones in circulation today came home in a kitbag.
Our replicas: Luger "Artillery" Parabellum P08 and the Call of Duty Luger P08
The Mauser C96 "Broomhandle"
Semi-automatic pistol | 7.63x25mm Mauser | 10-round internal magazine
Strictly speaking the C96 is a First World War pistol that wandered into the second one, and a Victorian pistol before that - it dates to 1896. The distinctive grip gave it its nickname, the magazine sits ahead of the trigger and loads from a stripper clip, and the wooden holster clips to the back to turn it into a carbine.
Winston Churchill carried one at Omdurman in 1898 and credited it with saving his life. By 1939 it was thoroughly obsolete, though a fully automatic version saw limited service and captured examples turned up throughout the war.
Its real fame arrived much later. Strip the C96 down, add a scope and a flash hider, and you have Han Solo's DL-44 blaster - which is why this particular antique pistol is better known to most people today than half the weapons that actually fought the war.
Our replicas: Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" Pistol and the C96 Mauser Han Solo Blaster
The MG34
General-purpose machine gun | 7.92x57mm Mauser | belt or drum fed
The MG34 invented a category. Before it, armies ran two entirely separate machine guns: a heavy one on a tripod for sustained fire, and a lighter one a squad could carry. The MG34 did both jobs. On a bipod it was a squad automatic; on a tripod with an optical sight it was a sustained-fire weapon; it also went onto tanks, half-tracks and anti-aircraft mounts.
That idea - the general-purpose machine gun - is now how essentially every army equips itself. Firing at 800 to 900 rounds a minute, it gave German infantry squads a volume of fire their opponents could not match, and the squad's tactics were built around the gun rather than the other way round.
It was beautifully engineered and correspondingly slow to build, which led to the simpler MG42 and its notorious 1,200-rounds-per-minute shriek - the sound Allied troops nicknamed Hitler's buzzsaw.
Our replicas: Call of Duty MG34 with gunsight and sling and the standard MG34
The Soviet Union
The PPSh-41
Submachine gun | 7.62x25mm Tokarev | 71-round drum or 35-round stick
The Papasha - "daddy" - is the Sten's opposite number and its philosophical twin: a weapon designed to be produced in insane quantities by a country with an urgent problem. Roughly six million were built.
Stamped steel, a chrome-lined barrel that shrugged off corrosive ammunition, and a 71-round drum feeding a rate of fire around 900 rounds a minute. The Red Army did something no other army did with it and equipped entire companies with submachine guns, on the logic that at the ranges Stalingrad was being fought at, volume beat accuracy comprehensively.
German troops liked it enough to use captured examples in preference to their own, which is about the highest compliment a weapon can be paid.
Our replica: Call of Duty USSR WWII PPSh-41
Japan: the officer's sword
Not a firearm, but no account of Second World War weapons is complete without it.
Japanese officers carried a sword throughout the war, at a point when every other army had long since retired the practice. The shin gunto - "new military sword" - was introduced in 1934 in a deliberately traditional mounting, reaching back past the Western-style sabres of the preceding decades to the tachi mounts of the samurai era.
The blades varied enormously. Some were mass-produced and machine-made, stamped out to keep pace with a rapidly expanding officer corps. Others were genuine hand-forged blades, and a good number were family swords, some of them centuries old, remounted in regulation fittings and carried to war by descendants of the men they were made for. Sorting one from another is a specialist skill and the reason surviving examples vary in value by several orders of magnitude.
Buying WWII replicas in the UK
Everything above is available as a non-firing replica, and it is worth understanding what that means before you buy.
These are display pieces. They do not fire, they cannot be converted to fire, and they are built to be looked at, handled and mounted rather than used. The weight and the balance are generally right, the actions on many of them work, and at a couple of feet they are convincing - which is exactly the point for collectors, re-enactors, museums, theatre and film work.
The UK regulates realistic imitation firearms, and legitimate retailers sell them subject to the conditions that come with that. In practice this means you need to be 18 or over, and that certain purchases are tied to defined purposes such as re-enactment, theatrical and film production, museum display and airsoft skirmishing. Any seller who does not raise this with you is one to be wary of.
At The Sword Stall everything is held in our own warehouse in Bacup, Lancashire. Nothing is drop-shipped, so what you order is a piece we have physically got on a shelf, and we can tell you what it actually weighs and how it actually finishes because we have handled it.
Browse the full replica guns collection, the World War I & II range specifically, or the Call of Duty guns if you came to these through the games. For events and conventions where metal is not permitted, our cosplay guns cover similar designs in event-safe foam.
Frequently asked questions
What was the best gun of World War 2?
For sheer influence, the German StG 44 - it introduced the intermediate cartridge and the select-fire rifle built around it, and every assault rifle since descends from it. For the gun that did the most actual work, the M1 Garand, which gave American infantry a semi-automatic rifle years before anyone else managed it. For the best return on effort, the Sten: about four million built, for roughly the price of a pair of boots each.
What rifle did British soldiers use in WW2?
The Lee-Enfield, chambered in .303 British. The SMLE Mk III served from 1907 through both world wars, and the simplified No.4 Mk I became standard from 1941. Its ten-round magazine held twice as much as the German Kar98k, and its bolt was designed to be worked without shifting the firing grip, making it the fastest bolt-action rifle of the war.
Was the StG 44 the first assault rifle?
Yes, in the sense the term is normally used - it was the first select-fire rifle built around an intermediate cartridge to be produced and issued in real numbers. Earlier weapons had explored parts of the idea, but the StG 44 assembled them into the form every modern assault rifle still follows.
Why is the MP40 called a Schmeisser?
Because Allied intelligence got it wrong and the name stuck. Hugo Schmeisser designed the MP18 of the First World War and later contributed to the StG 44, but the MP40 was designed by Heinrich Vollmer at Erma Werke. The misattribution was common enough in wartime Allied documents that it survives in general use to this day.
Did the M1 Garand's ping really give soldiers away?
Almost certainly not, despite being the most repeated story in small-arms folklore. Picking out a single metallic ping through the noise of a firefight, working out whose rifle it came from, and closing the distance before he reloaded in a couple of seconds is not a realistic sequence of events. Some American troops did reportedly throw empty clips as bait, which shows the idea was current at the time - but not that it ever worked.
What was the most produced gun of WW2?
Among the weapons on this list, the Soviet PPSh-41 at roughly six million and the American M1 Carbine at just over six million are the standouts, with the Sten at around four million. Bolt-action rifles were made in far greater numbers still - the German Kar98k and the Soviet Mosin-Nagant both ran into many millions.
Are WW2 replica guns legal to own in the UK?
Non-firing replicas are sold legally in the UK by established retailers, subject to the rules covering realistic imitation firearms. You need to be 18 or over, and some purchases are tied to defined purposes such as re-enactment, theatre and film, museum display or airsoft. Buy from a UK seller who raises this with you rather than one who does not.
What guns did the Home Guard use?
Whatever could be found, initially - shotguns, First World War rifles, and a large consignment of American M1917 rifles shipped over after Dunkirk. As production caught up they received Lee-Enfields and Stens, the latter being cheap enough to issue widely.
Every firearm described here is available from The Sword Stall as a non-firing display replica. Browse the World War I & II collection for the full range.
